91% of the customers listen to the voice of other customers before purchasing something. Therefore, keeping your customers happy and satisfied is crucial. One way to do this is through implementing proper customer feedback system.

What is a customer feedback system, you ask? Well, that’s what we are here for.

Read on to learn more about the concept, its importance, and how to create one for your business.

What Is a Customer Feedback System?

In simple terms, it’s a framework businesses follow to effectively collect, manage, and analyze customer feedback.

The idea behind the framework is to encourage businesses to listen to and act on customer feedback. By using proper customer feedback tools, businesses can gain actionable insights, make improvements, and meet customer expectations.

Why Is It Important for Businesses?

Meeting customer expectations is a dream come true for all businesses. The fact that a proper customer feedback system can facilitate this itself is a major reason why they are important. However, that’s not the whole picture.

Here are more reasons why you (businesses) should consider a feedback system.

1. Satisfy Your Customers

Imagine providing your customers with what they want. Great, right? This is exactly what you can expect from acting on customer feedback.

Look into feedback and see what exactly they are searching for. It can be a feature or service you provide but might not be your primary one, or you might not be providing it at all. Whatever it is, make the necessary changes and try to provide your customers with what they want. This can lead to better customer satisfaction.

2. Satisfied Customers Means More Retention

The more satisfied your customers are, the more the probability that they stay with your brand. After all, why would they consider others when they are getting what they want?

With acquiring new customers being a costly process, retaining them is the best choice. And listening to your customers can be the right way to do it.

3. Understand Your Strengths & Weaknesses

Now, this is a tricky one. The key to understanding your business’s strengths and weaknesses depends on the tool you use. Yes, you heard it right.

With tools like SurveySparrow, you can get key driver analysis. This feature provides you with a clear visual (graphical) representation of what’s driving your business success.

SurveySparrow CogniVue — Key driver analysis in SurveySparrow

4. Surpass Your Competitors

You have to provide something unique to stand out from competitors. Implementing a customer feedback system can help here.

Take Starbucks for example. While analyzing their customer feedback, they found a high demand from customers to provide options for order and pay and better loyalty programs. So, they introduced their mobile – for ordering and payment – and introduced special loyalty programs like discount coupons.

The result? Increased customer convenience, which led to higher customer satisfaction. The loyalty program has also worked, engaging customers and increasing repeat business.

5. Make Decisions that Actually Work

Which feature would work for our product?

We should consider changing the website design, don’t you think?

AI is everywhere, we should also add them, shouldn’t we?

The questions go on. It can be difficult to come to a decision when you don’t have a proper idea whether it will work or not. However, with insights from customer feedback, this is not the case.

You can tailor surveys to collect customer perceptions, analyze the feedback, and work on them. For example, you can query about the feature essential for the customers, but you are not providing. This way, you can be sure that the additions or the changes you make will be fruitful and helpful for your customers.

If you are interested, you can run a survey now. Here’s a survey template from SurveySparrow. It’s completely free, so just sign up to use it.

Customer Feedback Survey Template

Preview Template

Implement a Closed Feedback Loop

Closing a feedback loop is one of the most crucial aspects of a customer feedback system. For those who don’t know about the tactic, closing the feedback loop involves listening to, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback and informing the customers about the change.

The purpose is to let your customers know you value their feedback and opinions. At the same time, you will improve your business performance based on feedback.

Here’s a quick overview of how closing feedback works –

Step 1 – Listen

This is where you collect feedback from customers. Surveys are the best way to go about it. Bonus points if you are using SurveySparrow as it allows you different ways to collect feedback. Some of the key ways are as follows.

WhatsApp Surveys

WhatsApp is the most popular chat app around the world. Therefore, tapping into that channel can be the best way to reach your customers. With SurveySparrow, you can create WhatsApp surveys in just 2 clicks and share them to collect feedback.

Offline Surveys

No internet, don’t worry! Allow your customers to respond to surveys even without internet connectivity. The response will automatically get synced once back online. Offline surveys are particularly useful and improve the response rate.

Prevent your customers from saying, “Oh! I don’t have the internet to take the survey…will do it later”.

In-app Surveys

In-app surveys are useful for digital product companies. It offers a rather convenient way for the users to communicate their issues (or opinions) with you.

SMS Surveys

Invite your customer to take part in the survey (with survey link) through SMS message. SMS surveys can be done provided you have phone numbers of your customers.

Website Surveys

Share your feedback survey on the company website. This can be through a pop-up, slide-up, or feedback button. Website surveys are useful for collecting feedback related to UX, website content, and purchase experience.

Email Surveys

Emails are often used as a medium to engage and foster a strong relationship with customers. With one in every 4 customers opening their emails, email surveys can also be a good channel to collect feedback

Step 2 – Analyze & Prioritize

Once you have collected the feedback, analyze them to understand customer concerns and success stories. Yes, there will be positive, neutral, and negative feedback. What you need to do is to prioritize and act on the feedback.

For example, after an NPS® survey, you found that you have more detractors than promoters, which is not good for business. So, looking into detractor concerns, prioritize those that need immediate attention, and plan accordingly to resolve them.

Step 3 – Act

Come up with temporary solutions to bypass the issues for the time being (but implement a permanent one soon) and resolve them. But it’s not the negative feedback (or detractors as in the example) we need to reply to. Every feedback deserves action.

For negative feedback, you can do the above mentioned.

For neutral feedback –

Thank them for their feedback and let them know that you are continuously improving the business to provide the best customer experience.

For positive feedback –

Thank them for their feedback, and provide a special offer or something (loyalty program) to keep them engaged.

Step 4 – Follow Up

As the final step, follow up with the customers and let them know the issues they raised have been resolved.

Remember to thank them! Let them know that this was possible only because of them and how helpful they have been in improving the overall experience.

If you have doubts about how a follow-up survey might look, here’s an example. Like earlier, this one is also free to use upon sign-up.

Follow Up Survey Template

Preview Template

How to Create a Customer Feedback System?

Now, to the main part – how you can create or implement a customer feedback system into your organization. It involves mainly seven simple steps, and they are as follows.

Step 1 – Define Your Goal/Objective

You should have a strong command over what you want to achieve with the customer feedback system. What specific information are you looking for? Is it regarding your product features? Or is it regarding the support team’s efficiency?

Whatever it is, define it and work your way up.

Step 2 – Choose the Right Tool

This is the same for any aspect. Without the right tool by your side achieving success can be a difficult thing. Similarly, you have to choose a tool that’s best fit for your business and should be able to help you achieve the defined goal.

SurveySparrow, as the best online survey software, can help you collect, analyze, and provide actionable insights to act on them. Click here to learn more about how SurveySparrow is the right tool for customer feedback.

Step 3 – Make The Survey Straightforward & Concise

Make sure to keep your surveys simple, concise, and focused. Try using a mix of survey questions to get rich qualitative and/or quantitative feedback data.

For quantitative feedback try using surveys like NPS, CSAT, and CES. And for qualitative feedback try using open-ended questions.

Step 4 – Share Surveys Carefully

Share the surveys at the right time and through the best channels. Do research to learn when your customers will be free or active to take part in the survey. Also, try to understand the most preferred channels and share the surveys through them.

different survey share options on surveysparrow — Different survey share options on SurveySparrow

Step 5 – Close the Feedback Loop

We don’t want to repeat ourselves, so to be succinct – analyze the collected feedback, act on it, and follow up to let customers know about the changes.

PS: For those who skipped directly to this section, click here to learn in detail.

Step 6 – Regularly Review & Analyze Feedback

Collecting and analyzing customer feedback is a continuous process. Schedule feedback surveys at regular intervals for feedback collection and analysis. This will be very helpful in understanding patterns among customers and emerging trends.

Best Customer Feedback Tool – SurveySparrow

All through we have hinted which is the best customer feedback tool – it’s none other than SurveySparrow.

The tool offers a range of features and toolsets to help you effectively collect and analyze customer feedback. The following are some of the features that can be helpful for maintaining an effective customer feedback system.

NPS, CSAT, and CES Surveys: Run well customized surveys either NPS, CSAT, or CES to get quantifiable feedback data.
Sentiment Analysis: Analyze and understand precise customer emotions behind feedback.
Key Driver Analysis: Identify the key drivers of your business success (or the one that’s delaying your success).
Topics and Keywords: Learn the most discussed topics among the feedback and the most used keywords by your customers.
Multichannel Distribution: Choose from more than 10 channels to share your surveys.
AI Surveys: Get the help of AI to create a well-structured and customized survey in seconds.

Other key features include multilingual surveys, 1000+ pre-build templates, and reputation management.

The tool offers a free forever plan so that aspiring users like yourself can try it. Learn how efficient the tool can be and how easy to use it is.

Interested? Hurry and get your free sign-up now!

Customer Feedback System [CFS]: A Mini Guide